‘Designing Women Live’ stars mostly men

Onstage Atlanta pays homage to popular Atlanta-based sitcom.

Apologies aside to Coca-Cola and the Braves, there was a time not long ago when Sugarbakers arguably was Atlanta’s best-loved institution. What’s that, it wasn’t real? Try telling that to several generations of devoted fans of “Designing Women,” the sassy, serpent-tongued, Atlanta-set sitcom about four female best friends who worked together (but, c’mon, not very hard) at Sugarbakers & Associates interior design firm. For seven seasons on CBS starting in 1986, each episode averaged nearly 15 million viewers; from Lifetime to TVLand to Go to myAJC.com/living to read more on busy actor and playwright Topher Payne, including a look at the work that brought him the prestigious 2014 M. Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award. Logo, it’s been rerunning on cable almost ever since.

No wonder “Designing Women Live” almost always sells out — in a good way — at Onstage Atlanta. Starting tonight, the Decatur theater company is back with two supersized weekends’ worth of its wildly popular, almost word-for-word performance of classic episodes.

A couple of good-to-knows for anyone going: The first episode, “Julia’s Son,” comes

‘Designing’

from season one, while the second is a mashup of two different episodes (“Miss Trial” and “Foreign Affairs” ) from later seasons, so some minor tweaking’s occurred.

And, as always, the four women are played by men. But for the first time in nine go-rounds of “DWL,” the character of Sugarbakers’ only male employee, Anthony Bouvier, will be played by a